Orwell (37 page)

Gradually I learned the reasons for this distressing
volte-face.
Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus were just completing the four volumes of Orwell's
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
that were about to appear with a splash in the
fall and were not at all enthusiastic about what James called “a publishing scoundrel” prospecting in their gold mine. Even more to the point, Orwell had asked in his will that no biography be written. Between the time of my letter and my arrival, two Americans (one of them from Boston, where I had just come from), who knew that Malcolm Muggeridge had once been authorized by Sonia Orwell to write Orwell's biography but had abandoned it because he could not be entirely candid about his friend's life, protested their biographical innocence (so I was told), combed through the Archive and, like Lovelace in Richardson's
Clarissa
, only revealed their intentions when it was too late to stop them. I could only admire the resourcefulness of Stansky and Abrahams and realized that a biography of Orwell, like that of Kafka and T. S. Eliot, was both inevitable and desirable.

The four Orwell volumes appeared in the fall and, after the critics' initial enthusiasm had subsided, I wrote a long review-essay in
Philological Quarterly
, based on my familiarity with Orwell's eight hundred uncollected articles, on how much had in fact been left out of these deceptively incomplete volumes, which claimed to be a full revelation of Orwell's life and a substitute biography. I continued to publish articles on Orwell, and eventually met William Abrahams, who was enthusiastic about my work and made several suggestions that never materialized. In the summer of 1970 I did some burrowing in the India Office Library in London and discovered some new information about Orwell's constabulary career in Burma. The substance of my article on this subject, accepted in the fall of 1970 but not yet published, has been (quite independently) fleshed out and turned into the best chapter of
The Unknown Orwell.

This book and an unpleasant letter in
TLS
by Sonia Orwell appeared simultaneously last fall. In the letter Sonia Orwell states,
ex cathedra
, that the book “contains mistakes and misconceptions” and that it was “written without my cooperation and without my permission to quote from the work in copyright”—a considerable disadvantage for Stansky and Abrahams. She also states, with perhaps unconscious irony, that Bernard Crick, a political scientist, has been engaged to write the authorized biography. (This is quite in keeping with current publishing practice: a translator and indexer is editor of the entire twenty-volume Abinger Forster, and a history graduate edited T. E. Lawrence's poetical anthology,
Minorities.)
This announcement is not only a free advertisement for Crick's work, but also a staking out of territory that will inhibit publishers from bringing out books that might compete with it.

When my review copy of
The Unknown Orwell
arrived, I was surprised to learn that the authors were “deeply grateful” to
me
as well as to Valerie
Eliot, Lord Harlech and the Keeper of the Wall at Eton (who sounds like Snout, the “witty partition” in A
Midsummer Night's Dream);
grateful to discover that I had been immortalized in a footnote; and somewhat disconcerted to find that some of my ideas—the influence of Jack London's
The People of the Abyss
on
Down and Out
—so long embedded in academic journals, had been properly put before the public by Stansky and Abrahams. The “unknown” Orwell is a familiar figure, and this biography of his first thirty years, culminating in the publication of
Down and Out in Paris and London
, fills in the details of a picture that remains substantially the same. The authors have interviewed a great many people but have learned relatively little. They never describe what Orwell's father, a gruff-voiced elderly gentleman forever saying “Don't,” actually
did
in the Indian Opium Department; they do not state what Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, the terrifying Flip of “Such, Such Were the Joys,” thought about the adult Orwell and his corrosive essay on her school; and their chapter on Eton, where at least one had a cubicle of one's own, is more about the ceremonies and customs of the college (though they do not mention homosexuality) than about Orwell himself. With the exception of Cyril Connolly, who published his memoirs in 1938 and is a major source for this book, Orwell had no close friends in his early life. There was nothing unusual about the young Orwell, no promise of genius, very little to suggest that he would become, after D. H. Lawrence, the most influential English writer of the century.

The theme of
The Unknown Orwell
, “a study of Eric Blair becoming the writer George Orwell” in 1933, was suggested to the authors by Sir Richard Rees in 1967, but even then it was
vieux jeu
, for T. R. Fyvel wrote an essay on “George Orwell and Eric Blair” in 1959, and Keith Aldritt published
The Making of George Orwell
in 1969. Moreover, the central idea that “Blair was the man to whom things happened; Orwell the man who wrote about them,” is too facile, too pat. The crucial event in Orwell's life and the turning point of his political and literary career, what Erik Erikson calls “the moment,” was surely the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell found commitment, compassion and courage. The authors claim that Orwell went tramping to make use of his down and out experience as a writer, but his five years of Burmese experience certainly provided more vital and significant literary material than his rather superficial subterranean sojourns.

The essential thinness of this book (the first of two volumes) is disguised by trivial anecdotes and verbal padding which, like the heavy porridge that broke the boys' appetites at St. Cyprian's, fill one up without satisfying one's hunger. We are told what fizzy drinks young Eric bought from “the little old lady who kept the village shop,” and the “grateful vignette” of
Orwell's sister knitting his school scarf. But Orwell's birthplace in Bengal is described in a series of Eastern clichés—“its spicy smells and pungent flavors, its flamboyant sights and exotic sounds”—popularized by
Kim.
Because of the restriction on quotation, Orwell's few taut paragraphs on the bedwetting episode in “Such, Such Were the Joys” are expanded into five slack pages; and the authors fail to notice that several significant details in this essay come directly from the school scenes in
David Copperfield
and
Nicholas Nickleby.
(They also ignore, in their account of Orwell's reading, the important influence of
Ulysses
on the character of George Bowling in
Coming Up for Air.
The “night-town” chapter in
A Clergyman's Daughter
has become a dubious critical cliché, for it is not really “Joycean” at all.)

The authors devote three pages to Orwell's unremarkable juvenilia at Eton and
five
pages to his patriotic schoolboy poem on Kitchener (1916); and though they refer to the Field-Marshal's famous recruiting poster with the slogan, “Your Country Needs YOU,” they do not mention that this was a direct inspiration for the poster with “Big Brother Is Watching You” in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Their rather sentimental account of Orwell's “development” could apply to almost any adolescent: “He was ten years old, taller, wiser, and tougher than the sad-eyed bewildered small boy with whose homesickness ‘Mum' had tried to cope.” Their description of Orwell's happy childhood—“Eric conformed to the codes of the school, worked hard, did well in his studies”—is based largely on Connolly's rather than Orwell's own account of his feelings; and their pallid comment—“Disgust on one side; joy on the other. The tension between them was essential to him as an artist”—is a thoroughly inadequate treatment of a vital issue in Orwell's life: how he transformed his childhood guilt and suffering into an ethic of responsibility.

The most interesting part of
The Unknown Orwell
is the chapter on Burma, and though the authors have not found any letters from Burma and did not visit that country, they have discovered some new facts about Orwell's examinations, training and duties in that important and still obscure period of his life. Like the young Joyce Cary in Northern Nigeria, Orwell, as Assistant to the District Superintendent in Myaungmya, “was expected to run the office; supervise the stores of clothing, equipment and ammunition; take charge of the training school for locally recruited constables, as well as the headquarters police station with its strength of thirty to fifty men on active patrol duty and a contingent of escorts for hearings and trials in court. He would also check the night patrols in Myaungmya, and when his Superintendent was away, touring the sub-divisional headquarters within the District, he would assume general charge.”

The authors report the statement of Mabel Fierz, Orwell's friend in the early 1930s, that he told her “he had never been present at a hanging,” but they do not discuss the literary implications of this “most sensational confidence” in their long description of “A Hanging” (1931). Whether Orwell was imitating life or his own art, he repeated specific details from this essay in Symes' enthusiastic report of a hanging in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The authors quote the observation of a colleague in Burma: “As for female company I don't think I ever saw him with one,” as well as the suggestive remark of Brenda Salkeld, a young woman whom Orwell met in 1928 after his return from Burma, “He didn't really like women.” These comments correspond with Orwell's surprisingly celibate early life in the public school and police (he boasted of a brief liaison with a French tart, though his book on Parisian low-life has very few references to sex), and also to the unhappy sexual experiences of John Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon Comstock and Winston Smith in Orwell's novels. But these statements do not explain Orwell's two marriages (his first wife died unexpectedly after an operation in 1945) to two attractive women nor his love of family life.

Early in the book the authors state that at the end of his life Orwell overcame his long-standing dislike of Scotland and went to live on the island of Jura; and at the end of the book they relate Ruth Pitter's story of how the tubercular Orwell deliberately exposed himself to fierce winter weather: “It was suicidal perversity.” These two events are closely related, for Orwell had a strong masochistic streak, a permanent residue of the childhood guilt he describes in “Such, Such Were the Joys.” His “suicidal perversity” compelled him to live in a country he disliked and on a rugged and rainy island that undermined his precarious health and led him to an early death at forty-six.
The Unknown Orwell
ought to—but does not—explain how the Orwell of St. Cyprian's evolved into the Orwell on Jura; how an unremarkable youth, who began by writing banal poems in rhymed quatrains, became the writer who transformed the political experience of an entire generation into the veritably mythic power of
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bernard Crick's biography is even worse than Stansky and Abrahams' book. His style is flat and filled with clichés. He plunders previous scholarship without acknowledgment. He does not believe that biography can reveal the inner man and deliberately offers a strictly external view of Orwell's elusive and contradictory character: an odd mixture of personal gentleness and literary ferocity. And Crick is quite mistaken
about Orwell's suicidal sojourn on Jura. When he came to that remote, wind-ravaged Scottish island in 1946, wartime shortages were severe, essential supplies strictly rationed and often impossible to obtain.

Orwell's uncompromising intellectual honesty made him one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. In his credo “Why I Write” (1947), he recalled the effect of his combat experience in the Spanish Civil War on his style and thought: “What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art…. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly,
against
totalitarianism and
for
democratic socialism.” Because of his attacks on the Right
and
the Left, Orwell was praised and condemned by both sides. Lionel Trilling called
Homage to Catalonia
, which describes the Communist attacks on their Socialist allies in Spain, “one of the most important documents of our time.” But Mary McCarthy, in a rancorous essay, claimed Orwell would have supported America in the Vietnam war.

Animal Farm
, a political allegory on the betrayal of revolutionary principles in Stalinist Russia, was rejected by T. S. Eliot and many American publishers. But Orwell's clarity, precision, vigor and wit made it a popular success: it was translated into thirty-nine languages and had sold eleven million copies by 1972.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, which created the concepts of Big Brother, Doublethink and Newspeak, alerted the postwar world to the dangers of a totalitarian future. Like
Don Quixote
and
Pilgrim's Progress
, it became familiar to people who had never read the book. Like Silone, Koestler, Malraux and Sartre, Orwell was a political novelist who “felt responsible in the face of history” for moral awareness and social justice. He belongs with Johnson, Blake and Lawrence in the English tradition of prophetic moralists.

Bernard Crick, a professor of politics at London University, introduces his book by defining Orwell's achievement: “the finest political writer in English since Swift” and announcing his own curiously crippling method: “the best that a biographer can do is to understand the relationship between the writer and the man.” He does not believe a biographer can enter into his subject's mind, rejects “the fine writing, balanced appraisal and psychological insight that is the hallmark” of English biography, and dismisses the great line that runs from Johnson's
Lives of the Poets
to George Painter's
Marcel Proust.